Sequans gung-ho for LTE Broadcast

The world may have determined that mobile TV broadcast -- via DVB-H or Qualcomm’s now defunct FLO TV -- is going nowhere especially in the United States and Europe. But LTE Broadcast -- which can effectively turn cell towers into the equivalent of mini-digital TV towers -- is looking to make a splash this week in Barcelona at the Mobile World Congress.

Enabling LTE Broadcast is an underlying technology of “carrier aggregation,” developed for LTE Advanced, a new specification designed for overall 4G enhancements.

At a time when network bandwidth is limited and operators’ spectrum is fragmented, LTE Advanced’s carrier aggregation is critical to “help group operators’ spectrum in a meaningful way,” said Georges Karam, Sequans CEO. For example, an operator can bundle two separate 5-MHz carriers and use this as one 10-MHz bandwidth. Or, the technology can be used “to combine two 20-MHz carriers to increase throughput to 40 MHz,” he added, allowing an operator to push big data.

Sequans is sampling next quarter its first LTE-Advanced chip, capable of carrier aggregation of 40 MHz total bandwidth. It is part of Sequans’ Cassiopeia platform, supporting 3GPP Release 10 specifications. With Cassiopeia, the company’s third generation LTE platform, Karam claimed, “we have leveraged nearly a decade of 4G experience to develop an exceptionally powerful LTE-Advanced solution.”

Carrier aggregationIntra-band and inter-band aggregation alternatives

source: 3GPP

Cassiopeia offers “extremely flexible carrier aggregation, allowing combination of any two carriers of any size up to 20 MHz each, contiguous or non-contiguous, inter-band or intra-band, for an overall total of 40 MHz of bandwidth,” he explained. Its implementation of carrier aggregation gives operators “the ability to get the most value possible from their LTE spectrum -- even the smallest slices,” he added.

Aside from helping spectrum-starved operators, carrier aggregation will provide more throughput capacity. Under such a scenario, “video will benefit,” said Karam, tempting operators to multicast popular content simultaneously over cellular networks.

Under today’s unicast model, when a user in a stadium streams video to his smartphone, he gets his own dedicated portion of the cell’s capacity to receive his content, even though another user sitting right next to him may be watching the same video delivered via a separate portion of the cell’s capacity. “That’s killing network capacity,” said Karam.

If a part of the network’s bandwidth can be turned into a multicast network by using LTE Broadcast, operators are likely to suffer less from the network congestion that results from the increasing use of video.

Let me be more specific about my disconnects here.
Carrier aggregation is important for a technology that requires cnannel huge channel widths, such as LTE does. It becomes much less important to ASTC or DVB-T2, which operate on 6 to 8 MHz channels. LTE as well as W-CDMA therefore provide carrier aggregation.
The comment about "on demand" video is certainly valid, but it's a non-sequitur. It is true that it takes a two-way network such as LTE to support VOD. You cannot do this with DVB-T or DVB-H. But then, this negates all that was said about the wonders of LTE broadcast. You do NOT "broadcast" VOD. By definition, what goes to an individual viewer only is not "broadcast." So using LTE in MBMS mode, for this type of VOD programming, is an egregious waste of spectrum!
Previous mobile TV efforts, such as DVB-H, were also based on standards. They failed anyway. So just because LTE MBMS is also a standard surely is no guarantor of success.

Bolderdash. The only possible advantage LTE broadcast has over more efficient schemes, such as DVB-H or DVB-NGH, or even DVB-T2 tuned to work most effectively with mobile devives, is that the cell carriers can extract revenue for the LTE broadcasts. They cannot do so if cell users can bypass the carrier's cell network and go directly to the OTA broadcaster's network.
The carrier aggregation issue is an orthogonal discussion. It's useful to LTE, mainly because LTE requires such wide channels, and carriers don't often have slices that are 40 or 80 or more MHz wide. If you look at the numbers, though, you pay a price for LTE broadcast, compared with DVB-T2 for example, in spectral efficiency. In order to approach the spectral efficiency of DVB-T2, the LTE network needs to have very closely spaced towers. You pay price to transmit broadcast over a network designed for two-way unicast.
Those technical issues aside, mobile broadcast has always been a tough call. I guess that people on the go would much prefer to view content on demand than to have to conform to broadcast schedules. LTE will not change that. We've read this type of news item enough times now that I am quite skeptical. Just because something can be done does not mean that it should be done.

Ok. so this means, an additional receiver chip is not needed in the smartphone to receive TV signal, And can use the existing LTE modem with minor modifications. Right? If so that is an interesting proposition. This might have been a reason for DVBH/Mediaflo failure in addition to Internet streaming video.